It is all too easy to overlook nonfiction film at Cannes, where documentary is, if you go by institutional classification, largely a vehicle for chronicling the history of cinema. This year, the most compelling documentaries were found in the parallel festival showcases. The winner of the Œil d’Or (Golden Eye for the best documentary at Cannes) Imago, from Deni Oumar Pitsaev, was in Critics’ Week. Likewise, ACID had the most formally challenging documentary this year at Cannes, Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, and it was Directors’ Fortnight that premiered a Ukraine documentary with stunning and often inventive cinematography, Militantropos, by the Tabor Collective.
Imago
In Imago, the Chechnya-born filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev journeys to a Chechen enclave in Georgia named Pankissi, where his mother has secured a plot of land for him to settle down. He spends time with his mother, with whom he’s close, and a hearty cousin and a friend, but he has barely seen his father since his parents divorced when he was nine months old. That’s on top of a childhood marked by his and his mother’s stays in Kazakhstan, Chechnya, and—when the Russians attacked Grozny in 1996—St. Petersburg, where she changed his Chechen name for his protection. After Imago won L’Œil d’Or, the best documentary prize of Cannes, Documentary interviewed Pitsaev about starring in a film about his life journey and the balance between pre-planning and responding in the moment.